and you’ll see that the URL produces a 404 error on the search.yahoo.com domain.

According to Compete, Geocities had 10MM visits last month – a fair amount of which I am sure came from organic search. I have no idea what those visits were worth but I would bet that it’s a lot more than $0 which is what the value of those URLs is now.

This is a classic case of an organization either not understanding or ignoring the value of SEO and if I were a shareholder I would be asking what would have been so hard about at least doing a global 301 redirect of the entire domain.

If you are thinking about turning off a website, before you do it might be well worth your time to call someone who knows something about SEO to understand how to extract the maximum amount of value when you do it.

When you shut down a company, you usually try to sell off the old office furniture instead of throwing gasoline on it and lighting a match right?

MAKE IT GO VIRAL WITH YOUR AWESOME SHARING POWERS:

61 responses so far ↓

I disagree – each page’s PR didn’t have to do with Yahoo itself anything. It was personal to site owner. And them 301-ing everything into one place would be somewhat of stealing or at least not fare move IMHO.

Right so you can do the “nice” thing & choose to 404 the whole domain, send the user to a brick wall & lose all of the SEO value or you can 301 it, maybe help the user slightly and retain some of the SEO value.

If you go the 404 route you’ll probably want to use the 410 status code meaning the page is gone and no forwarding address is known.

I am guessing the eCPM on these pages was close to $0. But to destroy it the way that they did is just boneheaded. I certainly would have paid them a lot for the domain, kept it alive and figured out how to increase the eCPM while bringing costs way down.

Well, the thing to keep an eye on now is whether or not Yahoo’s paid hosting service picks up business. While they don’t seem too interested in preserving the content or pagerank of their domain, they are definitely trying to push people in to the ‘premium’ hosting package. Now, I’m not sure if they’ve marketed this right, because they don’t seem to be doing much in the way of contacting Geocities site owners (then again, maybe my Geo account was under an ancient email address I’ll never see again).

If they can convert 0.1% of their Geocities users into paying hosting customers, they’ll probably turn a profit on the switch. Even 1 out of 1000 is a big if, though.

Far too late for that surely, John. All they did was make an announcement some time back on people’s GeoCities GCPs. The site owners have had plenty of time to go away and explore other free hosting options. And “free” was why most of them were there in the first place. I’d found GeoCities unreliable for hosting a regular quarterly ezine more than a year ago. I’d already switched that to another hosting service which is cheaper than the Yahoo option. The stuff I don’t want to pay for — free sample chapters from books — is now at Webs.com. Since I don’t use templates but go the HTML route, there’s no difference in how the pages look. What I won’t be getting, apparently, is free stats on visitor numbers etc. But at the end of the day, the only stats I’m really interested in are book sales!

Yeah, I guess even if they do make a few bucks on the way out, they could have done much more in terms of optimizing the link flow and in marketing the option of switching to a paid hosting service. There’s no excuse for maximizing every available opportunity, especially in a company that needs some income and momentum. Since everyone came to Geocities for the free aspect, they should have at least been pushing some free trial to get more people to give the upgrade a shot. Now Yahoo just seems like they’re in a rush to find the exit, everything is shutting down and nothing new is replacing it.

What is their business model without Geocities or search? Just a homepage/portal and an overpriced hosting service? I feel a little bad, like anytime a historic part of the web starts becoming irrelevant. Then again, I guess its been almost ten years since I built a page on Geocities and a year or two since I regularly used a Yahoo service of *any* kind, so I’m not sure what I’d really be missing other than a tradition and the illusion of competition in the search market.

I don’t know Nick. It’s one thing to trim the fat, it’s another to throw out the bone that I could have used to make a great stew. Feel free to respond with your own tortured analogy.

Simon, while I can’t rule out legal red tape 100%, they did own Geocities completely so I am not sure how 404ing a page is any different legally than 301ing it for them. Re resources it’s true that it might have taken someone a few minutes to put a 301 redirect and there probably would have been some ongoing server costs but seems like pennies compared to the lost value.

I still don’t get why they didn’t just sell the thing. Demand Media or someone like them would have paid a lot for it.

A 301 redirect would actually be an inappropriate thing for a Search Engine (they still have one right?) to do since it would violate HTTP protocol.

301 means the location of the content has changed. In this case (however bad the decision) the content is gone. The most appropriate response would actually be 410 – gone and not coming back.

It’s a little hard for me to believe that they couldn’t have turned 10MM page views/month into something profitable. Content Match ads? Something!

But, this is just one of a long line of mis-steps Yahoo has pursued. I was an early customer and shareholder in GoTo.com, later Overture. Yahoo took that search business, destroyed it through neglect for 5 years, then tried to resurrect it with a half-hearted “Panama” update. It is still the worst PPC of YHOO/MSFT/GOOG. With all the crazy ideas they’ve followed, why they couldn’t devote development resources to such a clear opportunity like that — I don’t understand it.

Also, when I first read the headline I thought it was referring to their new $100 Million ad campaign. It’s about You!

Chris, this is one of those philosophical things – certainly a 410 is the by-the-book approach – but if you want to try to retain any value SEO-wise the 301 is the way to go. And if you wanted to you could make a case that GeoCities is being rebranded Yahoo and all of the content is being “rebranded” as Yahoo search pages or something like that. It may not be the purest approach from a W3C pov, but that’s why churches do good business on Sundays.

Total agreement about the It’s About You! campaign. I just don’t get how someone could have approved that budget. They would have been better off sending a check for $1 to every U.S. household and calling it the Yahoo Stimulus!

You are out of your mind if you think that Yahoo isn’t aware of how 301 redirects and pagerank work.

I don’t suppose it had occurred to you that the google algorithm is changing in a way that negatively impacts how pagerank flows to and from framed pages? Or how framed pages are faring more poorly in search engine rankings? I would have guessed that an SEO professional would be on top of this sort of information.

Perhaps you hadn’t noticed that geocities alexa rank has been falling steadily – from about 50 2 years ago to around 200 today.

Perhaps you hadn’t considered how much it was costing yahoo to operate geocities?

Isn’t it amazing that yahoo management, with all sorts of information about yahoos plans for the domain, weren’t smart enough to understand what is so obvious to you? Maybe you should send them a resume.

How many SEO “clients” of yours are search engine companies? I expect your get-rich-quick-scheme “clients” to be ignorant of many things. Even the “big” ones. But you probably shouldn’t impute the same ignorance on multibillion dollar international search engine companies.

I have a hunch that in this case Yahoo could teach YOU a thing or two about pagerank and SEO – your own mighty PR5 notwithstanding.

Hey Alex, not sure what’s got you in a tizzy today but I don’t think I’ve ever had a get rich quick scheme client – although I wouldn’t mind one because I imagine that would be a fun SEO project. If you must know several of my clients are top 200 Alexa/Compete/Quantcast whatever sites, get a ton of traffic making good user experiences, adding value to our fabulous digital community and all that.

I am sure Yahoo could teach me a lot about PageRank and SEO as could you. We all have our different experiences with what works and what doesn’t. And in my experience Yahoo just flushed millions of dollars of value down the drain.

I don’t mean to chain post but I think a little elaboration is in order.

1) If you redirect a page to another page that has nothing to do with the linking page or the anchor text, NO pagerank will flow anyway.

2) If you redirect an entire site to one URL, a very small percentage of the pagerank flows to that page. And if that URL has content that isn’t relevant to the linking page, zero PR will pass.

3) Google, yahoo, msn, and tons of other companies do not put ads on 404 pages. Most advertisers loathe having their ads served on pages that the visitor doesn’t want to see. Google has been sued over this, remember?

So what do we have? Very little pagerank flowing, and you can’t serve any ads.

Not so sure I agree with you about redirecting to a page that has nothing to do with the old page. I have seen plenty of examples where we have 301′d an unrelated domain, an unrelated page, etc to another URL and increased the rankings of that URL/Domain. I just don’t think the search engines are as smart as we want them to be. I do believe that it is much stronger to 301 to a relevant page because chances are the inbound anchor text to the old page contains some relevant keywords and the domains linking to the page probably have some contextual relevance.

Re the putting ads on 404 pages thing, the 404 pages on search.yahoo.com had search ads on them however, in testament to the fact that search engine companies don’t always get it right the first time, they have now changed the 404s to 410s. These pages were producing 404s all day yesterdayhttp://www.geocities.com/med_dictionary/

additionally, you guys keep rambling on and on and on about how Yahoo is losing out on the PR and SEO value like they need it. That’s like saying Bill Gates needs a $20 bill.

Have you guys forgot about all the high PR sites that Yahoo already owns? Their homepage is a PR9. Flickr PR9. delic.io.us, zimbra.com, and the hundreds of subdomains all probably similarily high. I doubt the redirected PR value would help them very much to rank any better than they already are.

i’m still gonna stick with my original claim that there’s probably some legal, financial, and/or resource red tape that we’re not privy to which has caused Yahoo to completely shut down Geocities instead of doing something else.

Simon, first rule of capitalism = no matter how much you have you never have enough.

I just searched “travel” in Google and Yahoo Travel is ranked #7. You think the GM of Yahoo Travel would say “no thanks” to anything that might help him/her rank above Expedia. Orbitz and the rest?

I have no doubt there was some internal debate at Yahoo about what to do with the GeoCities domain but having been around enough big companies to see how they usually work, I am putting my money on someone at the top said “end of discussion – turn the thing off” without really understanding the consequences.

I can imagine Google (and Bing) doing something special (manual) in such circumstances so that the end result is one of their choosing i.e. redirecting the entire geocities.com could have just been a waste of time. Just saying…

[...] Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo. [...]

What are you talking about? The geocities pages have all been replaced with pages featuring several links to various areas of yahoo. Doesn’t look like they’re wasting any pagerank to me.

I think you are grossly overestimating their revenue from geocities. How much revenue do you they get from 10 million visits a month? The ads were tucked in the corner and didn’t exactly stand out.

Even assuming $10 per 1000 impressions (and that is definitely an overestimate) that’s one penny per visit.

That’s 100K GROSS revenue per month or 1.2 million per year. Peanuts. Now think of all the costs involved. Now pay all the salaries and benefits. The cost of the servers and office space. They probably spent more than this on security issues alone.

Mr. Chairman, I totally agree that the Geocities model was broken, costly and something needed to be done about it. Just because Yahoo didn’t have a strategy for low cost/high eCPMs doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. I am guessing that if I gave you control of that domain (a top 200 in the world domain btw) you could have extracted a lot more value out of it v. 404ing, then 410ing millions of valuable URLs.

But, for a company that is actually in the business of making money on traffic it is odd that they couldn’t make the GeoCities thing work.

Chairman is probably right, the upside was just not worth it in the scheme of things. But, that doesn’t mean that the potential was never there.

This is similar to their PPC system. After years of neglect, it now seems like the best option is outsourcing the whole thing to Microsoft. But, during that same period of neglect Google created one of the most profitable business models on the planet out of the exact same business.

It is a little surprising that Yahoo did not leverage the SEO indexation of geo-cities better. Yahoo does a pretty good job on SEO, I think there were so focused on eliminating this business unit that it become a rush to shut-down as opposed to a proper exit strategy. Perhaps one day this will make a good subject for a thesis on marketing.

[...] Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo. [...]